Virtues: Past and Present

None of this is meant as a defense of Sterling. He seems by all accounts an unpleasant fellow who more or less got what he had coming. No, the point is to highlight America’s shifting emphasis on different virtues. Sterling’s infidelity and the public humiliation of his wife—the woman to whom he had been married for almost 60 years, who had borne him three children—was unremarkable. It was mentioned nowhere as a defect of Sterling’s character. His private, whispered racist thoughts, however, were important enough to elicit the displeasure of the leader of the free world. They were enough to cause his associates to expel him from their business and deprive him of his property.

Read all of Jonathan V. Last's article in The Weekly Standard.